Detour

Tom Shadyac

Tom Shadyac used to be the biggest comedy director going. His films, including “Ace Ventura: Pet Detective,” “The Nutty Professor,” “Liar Liar,” and “Bruce Almighty,” grossed more than a billion and a half dollars around the world. He perfected the formula in which hard laughs are annealed with homilies: relinquish your power, follow your bliss, and don’t talk out of your ass unless you’re Jim Carrey and it totally kills.

Late last month, at Lincoln Center, Shadyac screened “I Am,” a handmade documentary that cost a hundred and seventy-four million dollars less than his last comedy. Youthful and shaggy at fifty-one, the director welcomed the audience by saying that he hoped this film, unlike his others, would change the world. Met with mere politeness by a crowd that has a sizable stake in the world as it stands, Shadyac, looking worried, remarked, “You’re so well behaved.” After the screening, however, he was swarmed by young acolytes.

In “I Am,” Shadyac narrates his own fall from—or perhaps into—grace: a tumble from a bicycle, in 2007, that led to a post-concussive infirmity so severe that he began, almost as a valediction, to canvas the world for meaning. The result is a passionate, if patchwork, film that interweaves interviews with evolution scientists and Desmond Tutu, quotations from Emerson and Einstein, a discussion of quantum entanglement, and footage of an emotionally susceptible dish of yogurt, all to suggest that the natural world is deeply interconnected—and that we are by nature coöperative, that markets don’t measure our value, and that the heart, not the brain, is our primary organ. It’s what he was saying all along in his comedies, but this time he’s saying it with feeling. Shadyac’s own response to his discoveries was to give up his private jet (as well as his cell phone), sell his seventeen-thousand-square-foot compound in Pasadena and move into a trailer park in Malibu, help build a shelter for the homeless and fund the rescue of African child soldiers, and tour around the country—sometimes by bicycle—screening the film.

At Trattoria dell’Arte, a few days after the screening, Shadyac prefaced a lunch conversation by following the monastic practice of emptying his pockets of his possessions: a billfold wrapped in a black scrunchie, and a white scrunchie. As his meal consisted of a cup of peppermint tea, the server’s check-ins grew increasingly skeptical, but Shadyac always responded warmly: “I’m doing good, brother—how are you doing?”

His dark night of the soul now seems to him a providential course correction. “I think the bike accident knocked me into my heart,” he said. “As a director, our society teaches you that you can stand on top of the movie and say, ‘I’m the most valuable—or maybe the second most valuable, after our star—so I deserve all this stuff. Give it to me.’ But, if I ever do another Hollywood movie, I’ll arrange to get something like the Director’s Guild minimum”—$210,392, versus his customary eight-figure fee. “The rest will go into a charitable account.”

He knows that his character arc could inspire satire, emulating, as it does, that of the comedy director in Preston Sturges’s “Sullivan’s Travels,” who journeys as a hobo to gather material for a planned film about the downtrodden, to be called “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” Shadyac said, “I’m not doing this to punish myself—I’m doing it because it’s awesome. Imagine being able to have a dialogue with a freed slave from Ghana, James Kofi Annan, and then taking the resources that I have, which would otherwise sit in a bank account, and buying him a boat so he can go back and free others. Now, c’mon—it’s going to take a heck of a Maserati to beat that.”

One of Shadyac’s interviews was with his father, Richard, a lawyer and top executive at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, in Memphis, who died before “I Am” was finished. “My father, if he saw the movie, might say, ‘Utopian,’ ” Shadyac said. “In the film, I ask him, ‘Is it possible to build a business where we don’t leave our principles at the church door?’ And he says, ‘No, not knowing man.’ And yet he did it. He built St. Jude, the most beautiful place I’ve ever been. It epitomizes our sickness that my father, with all he did, was still stuck inside the sack of our culture. What I hope the film does is split the sack and say, ‘Stick your head out and look!’ ”

In sticking his own head out, Shadyac realizes that it’s not all about him—which, since he’s a natural ham, poses a conundrum. The middle way forward, surely, is to host a talk show. A show called “Shift Happens” is already in the works. “As strange as it sounds, you may be looking at the next Oprah,” he said, collecting his cash and his scrunchies and heading off to bike to Virginia. ♦